Ann Neumann: Speaking of Talk to Action: two of their writers, Chip Berlet andFredrick Clarkson, have posts up at Religion Dispatches. Clarkson writes, “Many challenges face those who think about, analyze and report on the Religious Right (let alone those who want to take appropriate political action.) One problem is acquiring some foundational knowledge. Another is finding generally...

Sojourners has just published a Covenant for Civility that seeks to “offer a message of hope and reconciliation to a nation that is deeply divided by political and cultural differences.” Some of the organizations represented? World Vision, Habitat for Humanity, Alliance of Baptists, National Association of Evangelicals, Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, The Mennonite Church, New...

Ann Neumann: “Nationalist, socially conservative, suspicious of markets, critical of Islam, authoritarian.” Sarah Posner points us to a new Guardian article by Andrew Brown on the British Religious Right and compares it to our own. One difference? More diversity.

Sarah Price Brown: Health activists and “social conservatives” are fighting over the new cervical cancer vaccine, writes Rob Stein in The Washington Post. Stein presents both sides of the conflict while managing to leave out one relevant piece in the puzzle: religion. The “social conservatives” who fear immunizing teenage girls against a sexually transmitted virus...

Can conservatism — or at least Bush’s variety of it — be born again? Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal columnist and former Bush, Sr. speech writer, counsels the president to model his “mid-presidency crisis” after his earlier mid-life dilemna, and fix it in the same way. Tempering her criticism with plenty of kind words and...

The Family Research Council — heir to the Christian Coalition as Washington’s most effective Christian Right political organization — doesn’t often stray far from the Republican line. But its sacrificing political loyalty in the aftermath of Katrina to score points for its church-instead-of-state vision. “The vast majority of displaced residents of New Orleans,” writes the...

There’s a ghost of a religion story in the news that House Republican leaders have booted ethics chair Rep. Joel Hefley in favor of more malleable ethics “leadership” friendly to ethically-challenged House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Hefley is no liberal Republican, nor has he ever been much of a maverick. But his district includes Colorado Springs, capital...

The Religious Right’s Big Tent Q.: What does “religious right” mean if being religious, and on the right, isn’t enough to qualify?Steven Waldman and John Green, two very knowledgable observers of American religious life, offer up some strange logic at Waldman’s Beliefnet. Catholics and “moderately religious” voters were just as essential to Bush’s victory as were “Born Agains,”...